I hesitated. I could tell this was what he was after, which made me wonder what he already knew. It also meant we both hoped the other had something interesting to offer.
I began vaguely. “Yup-gave it to ANR. Pat Mason’s handling it. Call him.”
I knew he already had and the response he’d received.
Katz tried again. “Too bad about Norm Blood. It’s a guarantee he’ll lose that farm.”
“Probably.”
“Lot of family in the area. Makes for a good local story. Sad one, though. You hear of any other local names connected to it?”
Here it comes, I thought. “Nope. We handed it over pretty fast. Haz mat’s not our thing.”
“How ’bout Jim Reynolds?” His words came out in a small rush, as if he’d suddenly tired of his own game.
I was startled and didn’t immediately respond. I remembered Tyler’s mentioning Reynolds’s office being broken into. Given his prominence as a state senator and a local attorney, I now realized I should have followed that up.
I decided to play it straight. “Can’t help you, Stan. Reynolds never came up. Why?”
I could feel him wavering, wondering how much to admit. “I got a call. Guy said there might be a connection.”
“To the truck or Norm Blood?” I asked.
Now I sensed embarrassment. Apparently, Katz had been hoping for a totally different kind of conversation from this.
“Neither, really, just to haz mat in general. I figured it was the truck, ’cause that’s the only case I know about right now. You been working on anything else concerning illegal dumping?”
“Nope. That’s it. What did your informant say, exactly?”
He sounded almost relieved to stop playing cat-and-mouse. “He didn’t identify himself. He requested me by name, and asked if I’d heard Jim Reynolds was up to his waist in illegal dumping. I said no, and he told me I better hop to it or the Rutland Herald was going to eat my lunch-again.”
The Herald was arguably the best paper in Vermont, and the fact that it regularly scooped the Reformer on Brattleboro stories was one reason it had earned that reputation. Katz himself had once defected to them briefly, just before the Reformer’s last owner had sold out to the employees, who in turn had wooed Stanley back.
“What did Pat Mason say?” I asked.
“A generalized ‘no comment.’”
I paused again, my brain teeming with questions Katz couldn’t answer. “Well, Stanley, I don’t know what to tell you. We haven’t heard a peep about Reynolds.”
His disappointment turned to bitterness. “But you’ll put me first on the phone list when you do, right?”
I considered trying to smooth his feathers. He had, after all, made me a gift of sorts. But I changed my mind. “All in good time, Stanley.”
After the phone died in my ear, I dialed Tyler on the intercom.
“Who filed the report on that break-in at Reynolds’s office?”
“Bobby Miller. I just saw him in the Officers’ Room.”
“Thanks.”
I left my cubicle, crossed the building’s central corridor, and entered the department’s other half through an unmarked side door that led directly into the communal area we’d dubbed the Officers’ Room. There were several desks scattered about, each one crowned with a beige computer. In one corner was the patrol captain’s lair, glassed in like my own, in another was a fridge and a counter with a coffee machine, a microwave, and an assortment of cups, plates, and other kitchen debris. Bobby Miller, coming on duty, was loading up on caffeine.
I tapped him on the shoulder.
His face lit up when he recognized me, which wasn’t guaranteed with all the uniforms, our department being pretty typical when it came to rivalry with the plainclothes cops. “Hi, Lieutenant. How’re you doin’?”
“Fine. I wondered if I could pick your brain about a call a few weeks ago.”
“Sure.” He finished pouring cream into his coffee and took it and a doughnut over to a small conference table nearby. “This okay?”
I took a doughnut myself and sat opposite him. “You were in on the office break-in at Jim Reynolds’s, right?”
He nodded, his mouth full.
“How did that go?”
He swallowed, took a sip of coffee, and then shrugged. “Nothing much to it. I saw the back door was slightly open when I drove through the parking lot, so I called for backup. Pierre Lavoie showed up about three minutes later, and we both checked it out. The office sits by itself on a patch of lawn, with the sidewalk out front and the parking lot in back, so it didn’t take much to go around the outside and see what was what.
“By that time, Sheila had joined us, so we all three went inside. As far as we could tell, things looked pretty intact. There was one filing cabinet in an inner office that had a couple of drawers open, but that was it.”
“No stolen computers or radios or anything else?”
Finishing a second sip, he shook his head. “Nope. It all looked normal. We called Reynolds at home right after, so he could confirm if anything was missing. He got there about fifteen minutes later.”
“Did you see anyone near the building before you noticed the door, like a lookout or maybe the burglar pretending to be a pedestrian walking away?”
Miller looked unhappy with himself. “I thought about that later. I was coming from the west, which means I drove past the front of the building, up its far side, and then into the parking lot. If whoever was inside saw me right off, he would’ve had time to head out the back. I did notice a car driving down the street next to the lot, away from the main drag, but it was only after I was writing the whole thing up that I wondered where it had come from. Given the direction it was heading, I should’ve seen it just before I pulled in, either in my lane or approaching from opposite. So it must’ve been already parked on that street, waiting. I didn’t think about it at the time, though, so I have no idea what kind of car it was. I just saw the taillights out of the corner of my eye.”
I thought it likely he was right, but I didn’t want to make him feel any worse by rubbing it in.
I moved on instead. “What was Reynolds like on the phone? Were you the one who talked to him?”
“Yeah. He wasn’t happy. Kept asking if anything was missing. I told him that’s why we were calling him. But he was different once he got there. After he gave the place a quick once-over, he acted like it was no big deal.”
“You mention the open filing cabinet?”
“Specifically. I figured a lawyer would be more antsy about that than a missing fax machine or whatever. You want my personal opinion, he was more upset than he wanted us to know. When I first showed him the open drawers, it was like he was glued to the spot, he was so surprised. That’s why his change of mood was so weird-like it was forced.”
I thought for a minute about what he’d told me, allowing him time to take another bite of doughnut. After he’d finished, I asked, “Bobby, do you have any idea what was in those drawers?”
He hesitated before answering. “Not really. There wasn’t much point in our poking around in them. I did take a glance, though. I think they were case files-old ones. I remember noticing that the tabs on the manila folders were bent and a little dirty, like they’d seen a lot of use. But I suppose that could be true for ongoing cases, too, considering how long it takes to get through the system…I guess I don’t really know. Sorry.”
I stood up. “Don’t be. That’s all I needed.”
To his questioning look, I added, “His name’s come up in something else. Seemed like twice in a couple of weeks was quite a coincidence.”
Bobby Miller was apparently satisfied with that, since he went back to his doughnut without comment.
I, however, was more curious than ever. I doubted the Reynolds break-in was any standard smash-and-grab. The contents of that filing cabinet had to have been the motive. The question therefore became: Did the thief have time to do what he’d set out to do, or had he been interrupted prematurely? Was Reynolds’s change of mood a feint, or did he see at a glance that he had nothing to fear?